Re: testing the chelsea signal

cc'd to Consume Bristol mailing list for people who wish to comment.

From: "Richard Higgs" <rich-NmThj6pccYC4mfPA/[email protected]>
> hi all, yesterday/thursday, neal, john, bails and myself were in the
> ecc and the chelsea testing the signal to find a reason for the lack
> of connection in the chelsea.
>
> john brought an osillascope to measure out puts, we found that there
> is a few 2.4g signals around easton, looking north up bloy street
> there's a strong signal [is that you andy?]

Nope, nothing up yet.  I'll get round to it when I have time though.  Did
you check SSIDs of the signals you were getting?  We may be able to extend
range by piggy-backing of others' wireless LANs.  They may be interested in
joining up to help extend the network - they already have the equipment!

> and looking west there's
> perdown with more 2.4g activity and looking at the town to the south
> there's a very strong signal. sadly we cant get a strong one out of
> the ecc. we think we might be between the lobes or off the side of
> the sector. john suggests we use an omni because the lobes are less
> and it's possibly easier to mesh. we have another air station so we
> can try different architecture.

I'd agree with that.  If everyone used omni-directional antennas, then
(provided they were at similar heights, we could mesh quite easily with
enough nodes.

> with all the noise and activity going on in bristol if we aren't
> careful with this, we'll soon all be drowning each other out. as more
> people put up there individual networks it could come to a crunch,
> how does consume deal with this?

It's not become an issue yet.  Hopefully, with the advent of legal 802.11a,
more people will move into the 5GHz band.  As more people get 802.11b
equipment, the task will be to get them to hook their networks with the
CLAN/Consume.  That's when we'll start to achieve a city-wide mesh.  It'll
happen soon, as prices are already low enough for average people to get a
wireless card.  We just need node costs to be low enough, and to get a
dedicated group of people together to go round installing them.  This means
everyone ... Linux techies, antenna aligning people, and ladder holders!

> we will continue to try getting the signal into the chelsea and keep
> you up to date with the progress, i'm going to try to get an omni on
> the bristol mission, i think that could be an answer.

The more nodes the better IMO.  I've been thinking about simple repeating.
As all nodes are intended to be static, we can easily do repeating without
MeshAP or anything difficult.  We just need a single card and a Linux distro
running on the node hardware.  We simply bind two IP addresses to the card.
The node will run a dhcp server pointing to itself as the gateway.  This can
be the same IP address for every node to facilitate some basic roaming
(although it'd be buggy!).  The second IP address will be in the same subnet
as every other node.  The default route for the node will be the second IP
address of the next node.  This works hop-by-hop to the gateway to the 'net.
Any comments on that?

Andy